On Monday, April 23, President Obama officially announced the
creation of the “Atrocities Prevention Board” (APB): a comprehensive
strategy to prevent and respond to atrocities. On the same day, the
APB Board of Directors held its first meeting, chaired by Samantha
Power, who declared that the APB would “coordinate action across the
entire government on stopping genocide and liaise with the NGO
community.” And on that same day, President Obama appeared at a
ceremony at the Washington Holocaust Museum, a most fitting place to
announce the inauguration of the APB, in respond to criticism about
Obama’s having not done enough to stop the atrocities in Syria, and
against earlier administrations that sat idly by during the war
crimes and genocide in Rwanda and Darfur.

Obama spoke in forceful language there, promising:

“The Syrian people have not given up, which is why we cannot give up.
So with partners and allies we will keep increasing the pressure so
that those who stick with Assad know that they are making a losing
bet.”

“In short, we need to do everything we can to prevent these kinds of
atrocities, because national sovereignty is never a license to
slaughter your own people,” Obama said. “Remembrance without resolve
is a hollow gesture. Awareness without action changes nothing.”

Inspiring words, superficially. But before we celebrate a new “never
again” broadcast from Washington, it is important to look at some of
the details of this new government initiative.

The first problem is Syria[i] (we will examine the second problem,
APB leadership, in part II of this article).

Numerous critics have asked why innocent blood spilt by Qaddafi in
Libya warranted military intervention but many thousands more
innocents dead and dying in Syria do not. Thus Wiesel asked
poignantly, in his introductory words to Obama, “So in this place we
may ask: Have we learned anything from it [the Holocaust]? If so, how
is it that Assad is still in power? How is it that the Number 1
Holocaust denier Ahmadinejad is still a president? He who threatens
to use nuclear weapons to destroy the Jewish state.”

And Obama answered as he has in the past, with a non-answer: “The
United States would continue increasing diplomatic, political, and
economic pressure on the Assad regime, but said the U.S. commitment
to end atrocities “does not mean we intervene militarily every time
there is an injustice in the world.”

Obama’s lame assertion that the US does not need to intervene does
not really answer the question. We did not need to intervene in
Libya either, but we did.

But perhaps the President had purposely chosen a lame and almost
risible response (we do not need to so we won’t, and instead we’ll do
things that we know will not work, like tighten sanctions even though
they are not working) precisely in order to avoid an honest answer.
Perhaps the President does not want the honest answer made public…at
least not until after his victory in the coming election.

The honest answer may be more akin to something like this. Libya was
an easy mark, little risk, good PR. Syria, however, is different.
Its army is more formidable than Qaddafi’s. It is known to be heavily
armed with shoulder-fired missiles obtained from Russia and China.
And perhaps most important, it is closely allied with Russia and
Iran. Obama does not want to alienate either. It is likely that he
is preparing for some post-election agreements with Russia concerning
nuclear disarmament and elimination of our missile defense systems
(remember that “hot mic” incident with Russian president Medvedev?),
so he does not want friction with this future partner now.

And regarding Iran, Syria is closely allied with Iran too, and serves
as Iran’s proxy in the non-Shiite part of the Fertile Crescent.
Obama does not want to precipitate another major armed conflict,
especially not with Iran, prior to the elections. If the U.S. were to
strike Syria, Iran would probably be forced to take some sort of
action, not only to support its proxy and ally, but also to protect
its base of operations in Syria and Lebanon, a base which it has been
building for more than 30 years. Moreover, Assad’s enemies include
the Muslim Brotherhood whose ultimate goal is the creation of a Sunni
Caliphate – obviously in competition with Iran for global Muslim
domination. So Iran could not stand idly by as the USA intervenes on
behalf of Iran’s enemies to bring about the demise of Iran’s ally,
and thus an Iranian counter-response would be almost assured. It is
also important to recall that Obama has been venting jeremiads
against Israel for the very thought of a military strike against
Iran. Obama would then be in the untenable position of striking Iran
to protect Syrian Arab Muslim civilians from Assad’s massacre, but
not striking Iran to protect Israeli Jewish (and Muslim and
Christian) civilians from Iran’s nuclear massacre[ii].

Obama doesn’t want voters to think he’s indifferent. So he creates
the APB in order to show that he is doing something; but it is also
something that Assad and Ahmadinejad can easily ignore. Even with
the best of intentions and impressive names and the imprimatur of our
President, it is obvious to even the most naïf that boards and
committees and NGOs do not stop men with guns. So no harm is done
to Obama’s plans to avoid confrontation with Iran and to maintain
good relations with Russia, good relations being needed for reasons
that Obama does not want to reveal until after his re-election.

In fact, Obama has worked hard over the past year or so to make sure
that he can continue to avoid confrontation while maintaining
plausible deniability. First, the Syrian opposition was deemed too
fragmented, so how could Obama know whom to back? Then, the White
House warned the opposition not to take up weapons, lest it forfeit
the moral high ground that Secretary Clinton claimed it had
captured. Then there was the problem of al-Qaeda infiltrating the
Syrian rebels’ ranks; but Obama failed to note that it was Assad who
first made common cause with al-Qaeda, causing Obama no
consternation. And now, with his new APB, Obama has created
plausible deniability for his inaction, even though it means losing
an opportunity to advance American vital interests by helping to
bring down Iran’s chief regional ally.

And perhaps worst of all, Obama’s endorsement of the doomed Annan
initiative means that the US position is effectively the same as
Moscow’s. The White House has even told its own allies, especially
Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, not to arm the opposition, thus
aligning the USA with the Russians.

So the Iranians continue working on a nuclear bomb, and the White
House warns Israel against bombing the reactors where the bomb is
being made. Bashar al-Assad continues to kill Syrian civilians with
Russian weapons and Iranian money, and Obama warns our allies not to
interfere and aligns us with Russia and Iran; and just to make sure
that no one thinks he is soft, our President unleashes — an advisory
board.

As Sen. John McCain recently observed, “… good bureaucratic
organization may be necessary to stop mass atrocities and gross human
rights abuses, but it is not sufficient. Ultimately, ending
violations of conscience requires the political will and moral
courage of world leaders, especially the President of the United
States. Unfortunately, that will and leadership are lacking in the
case of Syria today.”

Notes:

[i] For good summaries of the problems and contradictions in Obama’s
Syrian policy see “Syria: It’s Not Just About Freedom“; “While Syria
Burns“; “What’s Wrong with Having an Atrocities Czar?“; and “The
Spirit of Kellogg-Briand.”

The Orwellian Atrocities Prevention Board, Part II

As discussed in Part I of this article, Russia flies planeloads of
weapons to Damascus. Iran supplies Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad
with money, trainers, agents, and more weapons. With that kind of
backing, Assad can flip the finger at the UN’s Obama-endorsed cease-
fire plan and continue the carnage, with more than 10,000 dead at
last count. And what does Obama do? After months of ignoring or
dithering, he forms a committee to look in to the Syrian atrocities.
But not just any committee: no, a committee with multi-agency
participation!

If Obama really wanted to bring Assad down, a major defeat for the
USA’s regional enemy, Iran, then why not set about organizing,
training and arming the Syrian rebels in their sanctuaries in
Turkey? He would have Turkey’s blessing and Saudi Arabia’s
cooperation. But instead, a committee: the Atrocities Prevention
Board (APB).

Obama’s political motivations for forming this committee prior to his
re-election campaign, to diffuse criticism regarding his inactivity
in the face of Iran’s nuclear threat and Syria’s mass murder of
unarmed protesters, have been discussed in Part I. Now a look at the
APB’s future is in order, and its future is defined by its leaders.

The statistically most accurate predictor of 11th grade behavior in
high school students is their 10th grade behavior. The same is often
true of adults. A review of the two most prominent APB leaders’
recent past is likely to offer insight as to the direction in which
they may take the APB in the future.

Dr. Samantha Power, the new chairperson of the APB, announced its
formation last year. She is the academic and political power-house
who won a Pulitzer Prize for her book A Problem from Hell: America
and the Age of Genocide, and now advises the Obama administration on
the subject of international atrocities. She convened the first
meeting of the APB Board of Directors on Monday, April 23, as Obama
delivered his speech about American support for human rights at the
Holocaust Memorial Museum.

While Dr. Power is clearly well versed in issues relating to mass
murder, war crimes, and genocide, her ability or willingness to deal
objectively with global or regional issues relating to such
atrocities must be called in to question, given her past statements
and recommendations. She has a long record of antipathy toward
Israel and has argued that America’s relationship with Israel “has
often led foreign policy decision-makers to defer reflexively to
Israeli security assessments, and to replicate Israeli tactics.”

During a 2002 interview with Harry Kreisler, director of the
Institute for International Studies at UC Berkeley, Power said that
even if it meant “alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous
political and financial import” (i.e., American Jews), the United
States should stop investing “billions of dollars” in “servicing
Israel’s military” and invest the money instead “in the new state of
Palestine.” Moreover, she accused Israel of perpetrating “major human-
rights abuses” and suggested that the United States had brought
terrorist attacks upon itself by aping Israel’s violations of human
rights.

“What we need is a willingness to actually put something on the line…
and putting something on the line might mean alienating a domestic
constituency of tremendous political and financial import. It may
more crucially mean…investing literally billions of dollars not in
servicing Israeli military, but actually investing in the new state
of Palestine…”

She went on to suggest a rather revolutionary solution[i] to the Arab-
Israel conflict, US “external intervention” using American military
force against Israel:

“…in investing (the) billions of dollars it would probably take also
to support, I think, what would to be (sic!), I think, a mammoth
protection force…a meaningful military presence because it seems to
me at this stage — and this is true of actual genocides as well and
not just major human rights abuses which we’re seeing there — but is
that you have to go in as if you’re serious. You have to put
something on the line and unfortunately the position of a solution on
unwilling parties is dreadful, it’s a terrible thing to do, it’s
fundamentally undemocratic.”

So the chair of President Obama’s new Atrocities Prevention Board
once called publicly for the United States to impose by means of
military force an essentially anti-Israel resolution to end the
conflict by sending a meaningful military presence, a mammoth force
of American troops, to invade Israel in order to end the putative
abuses that she said were being committed there by Israel against
Palestinians!

Let’s recall that she made this pronouncement at a time when the 2nd
intifada was at its height, with Israeli buses being blown up by
suicide bombers almost daily and Arafat screaming “Jihad, jihad,
jihad” into PA television.

In March 2011, Glenn Beck covered Dr. Power on his radio show, and in
a subsequent article he concluded that Samantha Power is probably
the most dangerous woman in America, and a real threat to Israel. He
also noted that “[UN official Richard Falk] has been pushing for the
right to protect or the Responsibility to Protect to be used against
Israel and they’ve been trying this now for the last couple of years,
and that’s what this is really all about, period. This is about going
after Israel.” Beck concluded by reiterated his pro-Israel stance
and said that there are many forces that are making moves against
Israel. Samantha Power, who is clearly a force within the Obama
administration, stands among them.

It is, in sum, not unwarranted to suggest that Dr. Power may be
influenced by her anti-Israel predisposition as she takes the helm of
the APB.

The same concerns apply to Susan Rice (no relation to Condoleezza
Rice), US Ambassador to the UN and another Obama appointee to the APB
Board of Directors. She too has displayed an open hostility to the
state of Israel.

During the 2004 presidential campaign, she was a foreign-policy
advisor to Democrat candidate John Kerry. According to The American
Thinker, she advised Kerry to appoint two of the most virulent of
America’s anti-Israel political figures to a negotiating panel that
would engage Israel and the Palestinians: James Baker and Jimmy
Carter .

According to the Weekly Standard, in June of 2010 Rice played an
important role in pushing the Obama administration to support a
United Nations investigation of a deadly May 31 flotilla fiasco, when
a gaggle of Turkish ships tried to break Israel’s blockade of the
Gaza strip. The ships were intercepted by Israeli naval commandos
when they refused to comply with Israeli requirements that all cargo
be submitted for inspection. According to Israel, approximately 40 of
the 600-plus people aboard the vessels were Turkish jihadists who
instigated the violence, and several were known to have ties to
Islamic terrorism.

In February 2011, in one of the most extraordinary statements ever
made by an American official about Israel, Rice bitterly complained
about having to veto a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning
Israel and its settlement policy. She deliberately undercut the
impact of the veto by saying, “For more than four decades, [Israeli
settlement activity] has undermined security … corroded hopes for
peace and security … it violates international commitments and
threatens prospects for peace.” During her testimony before Congress
several months later, Rice reiterated that sentiment, adding “Israeli
settlement activity is illegitimate.”

So with two anti-Israel power-houses at the helm, a host of anti-
Israel political and academic voices cheering them on, many on the
left in mainstream media pandering to the Arab line with its routine
accusations of Israel’s atrocities and genocidal intentions, and the
President with the worst track record on Israel ever having
intentionally chosen them to direct the APB, it will be all too easy
for them to accept Arab accusations at face value, prioritize
Palestinian so-called victims over legitimate victims of atrocities
elsewhere, and declare the West Bank or Gaza Strip an “atrocity
zone.” Then Powers and Rice can use the APB to go after Israel. They
will see their wishes fulfilled: American armed forces invading
Israel to protect Palestinian terrorist “victims” from Israeli
defensive “atrocities.”

Perhaps Glenn Beck is right. Perhaps that is why Obama chose them to
run his new APB.

Notes:

[i] The only other American political figure to place such a notion
on record is former Chief Warrant Officer/counterintelligence special
agent, US Army, retired, Dick McManus, Democrat, of Everett/Mill
Creek, WA, who is running for Congress, 2nd CD-WA.